Magnolia Square

by Margaret Pemberton

  She pressed the palms of her hands against his chest, looking up into his dark, handsome, caring face. ‘He said some ugly things, Leon – about you – about you not being a suitable person to be his great-grandson’s adoptive father.’

  A pulse began to throb at the corner of Leon’s strong jawline. He didn’t have to ask her what kind of things had been said, he already had a very good idea. Joss Harvey’s insults would have had nothing to do with his ability to be a kind and loving father to Matthew, or to his ability to provide for him; they would have been racial slurs, the kind of slurs he had suffered all his life.

  Kate’s eyes held his steadily. ‘He said that we could settle the matter either in court or out of it, but that if we chose to go to court, he would make sure that his viewpoint was splashed all across the local papers.’

  From outside they could hear the voices of Matthew and Luke raised in argument as they disputed over the best place in the garden for their picnic tea. A lawn-mower was being trundled in a nearby garden. Distantly, the sound of a long tug whistle carried up from the river.

  ‘His viewpoint being?’ Leon prompted tautly.

  Reluctantly, not wanting to hurt him yet knowing that he had to know just what depths Joss Harvey would sink to if he was ever to understand the agreement she and he had reached, she said, ‘That Matthew is his flesh and blood. That he is a white child whose father came from a middle-class background and that he, Joss Harvey, a wealthy pillar of the local community, is far more suited to have custody of Matthew than . . . than—’

  ‘Than a Black Sambo seaman,’ Leon finished bitterly.

  ‘I’m sorry, love,’ she said, hating Joss Harvey’s ignorance with all her heart, ‘but you were the one who warned me of the kinds of things that some people would say and—’

  ‘And was this said to you before you got in the car with him, or afterwards?’ There was an edge to his voice she had never heard before, an edge that warned her that for the first time in their entire relationship they were on the verge of gravely misunderstanding each other.

  ‘It was before I got in the car,’ she said quietly, ‘and I got in the car because I knew that unless I reached some sort of an accommodation with him, he would begin a long, vicious fight with us for guardianship of Matthew.’ Her voice broke slightly and she could feel tears beginning to burn the backs of her eyes. ‘And that one of his ways of doing so would be to bring to everyone’s attention the fact that you and Matthew are racially different. At the moment, no-one thinks it at all odd that you should become his legal father, and I don’t want them to start thinking differently. I don’t want us to have to go through all the hideousness that would bring in its wake, or to have the children go through it . . .’

  Her voice cracked completely and his arms tightened around her. ‘I don’t want that either, sweetheart,’ he said thickly, pulling her close again, his lips brushing her hair. ‘And so what “accommodation” did you and he come to?’

  She took a deep, steadying breath. ‘That he could begin building up a relationship with Matthew. That he could take Matthew out once a week—’

  ‘And you’d trust him? After all that happened when Matthew was a baby, you’d trust him?’

  Once again she looked into his dearly loved face, her eyes holding his. ‘We have to, Leon. Only this way will your adoption application go through unopposed.’

  Anger and frustration chased across his face. None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for his skin colour, and yet he was as British as Joss Harvey! He had been born in Britain. His mother could probably have traced her Kentish ancestry further back than Joss Harvey could trace his.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said urgently, needing to love her; needing to reassure himself that none of the difficulties they were going to meet as a married couple would ever take her away from him.

  Her own need for comfort was just as great as his. It flamed through her eyes as she said despairingly, ‘We can’t – the children. . .’

  ‘The children can picnic on their own,’ he said, releasing his hold of her and picking up the bowl of strawberries. ‘You go up to our bedroom. I’ll be with you just as soon as I’ve taken these out to Matthew and Luke.’

  ‘Hey up, there! Let the dog see the rabbit,’ Daniel Collins said genially that evening as he tried to reach the bar through the crush. ‘A pint of mild, barman, when you have a mo. Goodness, gracious me, if it’s going to be like this in here every night now Jack Robson’s home, I’ll have to start drinking in Blackheath!’

  The elderly barman grinned. ‘If all Jack’s mates keep coming here to drink once Jack’s home for good, your custom won’t even be missed,’ he said affably, pushing a frothing pint across the bar-top in Daniel’s direction. ‘Try not to spin it out till the end of the night. If I had to rely on your custom, my right hand would think my right arm was broke.’

  It was well known that Daniel was practically a teetotaller, and there were gusts of laughter from the throng hemming him in. Daniel was happily uncaring. He’d only come down the pub in order to welcome Jack back. He looked around, trying to find a quiet place to sit.

  ‘Yer won’t find one!’ Miriam called out from the table she was sitting at with her mother and Christina. ‘All Jack’s mates from Lewisham and Catford ’ave come to see ’im.’ She moved over a little on the shabby banquette that served as seating on the wall side of the table, to make room for him, saying, ‘An’ ’e’s got a lot of mates, ’e always did ’ave.’

  ‘It’s nice to see Jack home,’ Daniel agreed wholeheartedly, ‘but dear, oh dear, his mates make it as crowded as the Yanks did last summer. A pub should be where a man can come for a bit of peace and quiet and a game of cribbage, not somewhere he can’t hear himself talk.’

  ‘Why for do you want peace and quiet when you go out?’ Leah asked. ‘Peace and quiet you can get at home.’

  ‘Not in our ’ouse, you can’t!’ Albert boomed, squeezing through the crush and setting Miriam’s and Leah’s drinks down on the table. ‘In our ’ouse peace and quiet is as rare as bananas. Talking of which, I’ve been told we’ll soon be seein’ a banana boat cruisin’ up the Thames again. Now, that’ll be a grand sight, won’t it?’

  ‘It will be if we all get the chance of some and there’s not too much black-marketeering,’ Daniel said cautiously.

  Nellie Miller was seated three tables away, but she had ears like the proverbial elephant. ‘Black-marketeering?’ she thundered in a voice that could have been heard in Greenwich. ‘If there’s any black-marketeering about, count me in! My last little windfall was parachute silk. It made wonderful knickers.’ She twanged an elasticised ruche just above a mammoth-sized knee. ‘I’m safe as ’ouses in these, an’ if I should fall from a great ’eight I’ll ’ave an easy landin’!’

  ‘The poor bugger you fall on won’t!’ some wag rejoined, and the pub rocked with ribald laughter.

  ‘Hey, Nellie!’ Danny Collins pitched in from his favourite spot near the end of the bar. ‘Is it true you don’t get undressed any more, you just strike camp?’

  As the laughter reached deafening proportions, Christina smiled so that she wouldn’t look as if she were being a killjoy, and tried to catch Jack’s eye. He had gone to the bar ten minutes ago to buy a round for all the mates who had heard he was home and had popped in to The Swan to see him. From where she was sitting she could see him easily, tall and broad-shouldered and the centre of attention.

  Her stomach muscles tightened in a mixture of desire and love and apprehension. This was the way it always was with Jack, and she had the common sense to know that it was the way it always would be. People gravitated to him like moths to a flame, attracted by a magnetism impossible to analyse. He had been the leader of every gang he had ever been a member of. Leadership was his style, but only a very particular kind of leadership: a leadership with a hint of lawlessness about it. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap. Her father would not have approved of Jack. Nor would her mother. Th
ey had been very middle-class, very respectable, very law-abiding. And her middle-class, respectable, law-abiding father had been shot in the street and her very correct, very conventional mother had been forced to scramble at rifle-point into a truck no better than a meat truck en route to a slaughterhouse.

  Fresh laughter was rocking the room. Was it something else Nellie had said? Something Charlie had said? She didn’t know. She was impaled again on the pain of her past, a past no-one else in The Swan had shared or could even begin to understand.

  ‘Come on, pet. Drink up your lemonade and ’ave another,’ Albert was saying to her as he rose from the table to get another round in. ‘Why don’t you have some whisky in it this time?’

  ‘You don’t know why the Socialists won the election?’ Malcolm Lewis was saying to the barman. ‘I’ll tell you why! It’s because this country has just fought a war, and if we’d lost, all the landowners in Great Britain would have lost all their land. It would have gone to Germany. Now here you’ve got millions of young men coming home out of the forces . . .’

  ‘I’ve nothing against cats,’ a mate of Jack’s was saying to a gullible Miss Helliwell, ‘but when I’ve eaten one of ’em I’ve ’ad enough.’

  ‘. . . they’ll all be getting married and wanting homes,’ Malcolm Lewis was continuing heatedly, ‘and when they get a house, that house will be costing them extra money because somewhere along the line someone had to pay for the land it’s built on. Now that land is land that British men have fought and died for and it’s land that should now be theirs by right . . .’

  ‘Stop screaming, Emily, for the Lord’s sake,’ Nellie was saying to a distraught Miss Helliwell. ‘’E was only kiddin’ yer about the cat. No-one eats cats in Britain, they don’t even make muffs out of ’em!’

  ‘Do you think the Vicar knows young Malcolm Lewis’s politics?’ Daniel asked the table at large, a troubled frown creasing his brows. ‘Because they seem a bit on the Red side for a scoutmaster—’

  ‘To hell with politics, let’s have a sing-song.’ The speaker was Mavis. Her almost white, peroxided blonde hair was piled high, tumbling in curls over her forehead. Her mouth, fingernails and toenails were all painted a fiery red. Her chiffon blouse was purple, her tight shiny skirt emerald. She looked as gaudy as a South Sea parrot and as life-enhancing as a roaring fire.

  ‘Wot about “Cruising Dahn the River”?’ her mother suggested, moving empty glasses out of the way in order to make room for the second round of drinks which Albert was depositing on the table.

  ‘What about “We’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring”?’ Daniel, a romantic at heart, suggested as two of Jack’s mates gave Mavis a lift up on to the bar.

  Christina reached for her half-drunk glass of lemonade, her sense of disorientation growing. Didn’t anyone realize what a foreigner she really was? Didn’t anyone realize how alien she felt among them all? Albert pushed another lemonade, this time with whisky in it, towards her. Jack turned away from the bar and at last caught her eye, flashing her a wide, heart-stopping smile. For a brief, joyous moment she thought he was going to join her and then someone shouted across to him, demanding his attention, and the moment was lost.

  Her hand tightened around her glass. This noisy, laughter-filled, often bawdy, free-and-easy get-together was the kind of evening everyone else in The Swan had been brought up on. When they had been youngsters they would have sat on the pub’s doorstep whilst their parents enjoyed a knees-up. Billy and Beryl, and possibly Rose and Daisy, would most likely be sitting on the doorstep this very moment, enjoying crisps and lemonade and anything else their parents, or parents’ friends, might take out to them. Her childhood evenings had been very different. Friday evenings, for instance, had meant Shabbas and a special meal to celebrate it. It had meant her grandmother picking up the bread in the light of the candles and breaking it, dipping a piece in the salt and passing it across the table to her. It had meant dignity and tranquillity and a sense of tight-knit family security.

  Unsteadily, she set her glass back on the table. For years and years she had kept the past firmly buried, no longer the Christina Frank who was German and Jewish, but Christina Frank who lived in south-east London and worked in a south-east London market. The Christina Frank who had fallen in love with a south-east London boy and married him in a south-east London, Anglican church. Her throat tightened. If she continued secretly allowing her past to encroach on her present in this way, she would lose her reason. She had to share her anxieties and her anguish with Jack. She had to tell him of the guilt she felt for having turned her back on her religion and her culture; of the even more crushing guilt she felt at having escaped from Germany when so many hundreds of thousands had failed to do so. She had to tell him of her growing hope that her mother and grandmother had somehow survived and were waiting for her to trace them.

  Mavis, ignoring both Miriam’s and Daniel’s requests, had launched into a rip-roaring version of ‘Chatanooga Choo-Choo’. Even Harriet Godfrey, standing contentedly next to a euphoric Charlie, was singing along. Jack was laughing, motioning her to join him. Out of Army uniform and in a short-sleeved cotton shirt and flannels, he looked like a very useful, middle-weight boxer, his chest well-muscled, his biceps bulging, his hips narrow. She forced a smile, shaking her head, dark wings of hair falling forward and brushing her cheeks. If she joined him now, standing beside him as Harriet was standing beside Charlie, and Carrie was standing beside Danny, her inner turmoil would be blatantly obvious. She didn’t want to be with Jack in full view of all their friends and neighbours. She wanted to be on her own with him. She wanted to be able to share her thoughts and emotions with him and, when she had done so, to have the reassurance that he understood and sympathized.

  It had been impossible to reach such mental and emotional union after their love-making. As they had lain in a sweat-sheened tangle of sheets and pillows, Rose had knocked on the door to announce that her gran had just made a fresh pot of tea and that it was waiting on the table for them in the kitchen and that Charlie was also in the kitchen, impatient to welcome Jack home. Though she had hastily dressed and slipped her shoes on and brushed her hair, Jack had only bothered to pull his trousers on before walking downstairs with her to the crowded kitchen. She had wanted to die with embarrassment, certain she and Jack smelled of sex, positive that everyone present knew they had been making love.

  Miriam had poured out mugs of tea, Leah had handed round oven-hot bagels, Charlie had informed Jack that Harriet Godfrey was going to be his stepmother and was miffed to discover that he already knew. Jack, barefooted and bare-chested, his hair tumbled, had made all the proper noises of congratulation and Charlie had then told them that he and Harriet intended making their marital home at number two and that when Jack was demobbed they would have number twelve to themselves. More tea had been drunk. More bagels eaten. Nellie Miller had steamed in, wanting to know if Jack had brought any black-market goodies home with him. Later, Jack’s mates from Catford and Lewisham had begun arriving, and the noise and laughter had grown even louder.

  Christina wasn’t sure, but she thought that Carrie knew exactly how she was feeling, and that she thoroughly sympathized with her. Carrie’s marital bedroom was squeezed between Albert’s and Miriam’s bedroom and Leah’s bedroom and, looking across to where Carrie was leaning against Danny, singing the last notes of ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’, she wondered how on earth they managed their love-life.

  The door burst open, and Kate and Leon entered to a storm of greetings.

  ‘Where’ve you bin, the two of you?’ Charlie demanded, ambling forward to give Kate an avuncular and beery kiss on the cheek. ‘It’s nearly winkle time an’ yer ’aven’t ’ad a drink yet.’

  ‘Whose goin’ for the winkles?’ Nellie demanded, not missing a trick. ‘’Cos if it’s young Billy, he didn’t put enough vinegar on ’em last time. Winkles need lots o’ vinegar if they’re to put ’airs on yer chest.’

  Kate was wearing a full-skirted,
candy-pink-and-white striped dress, her waist cinched by a broad white belt. A white ribbon was twined in her long, thick braid of hair, making her look positively bridal, and Albert called out jovially, ‘Could you plait my ’orse’s tail like you’ve plaited your ’air, Kate? ’E wouldn’t ’alf look a bobby-dazzler trottin’ dahn the Old Kent Road with ribbons in ’is tail!’

  Kate’s smile was instant. ‘I probably could, Albert,’ she responded, well used to being teased about her childish yet oddly elegant hairstyle, ‘but you’d have to keep him still while I was doing it.’

  ‘’E can’t keep ’imself still, let alone his blinkin’ ’orse,’ Miriam said as Albert charged off to give Billy the orders for the winkles. ‘Sit down ’ere, Kate. I think ’Ettie and Daniel are goin’ to do a “Knees up Mother Brown” in a minute.’

  Kate squeezed along the banquette next to Christina. ‘Dad’s got some news for you,’ she said in a low voice so that no-one else should hear. ‘A response from the Red Cross. No real information in it of course, but . . .’

  ‘Let’s ’ave one of the old songs now, Mavis!’ Daniel demanded. ‘There’s no Yanks boogie-woogie-ing here anymore—’

  ‘More’s the pity,’ aged Esther Helliwell interrupted from her wheelchair, her sunken cheeks pink with daring.

  ‘. . . so let’s have “Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner” or “My Old Man”,’ Daniel persisted doggedly.

  ‘Is your father in on his own? Would he mind if I had a word with him now?’ Christina’s eyes were bright with urgency.

  ‘Yes he is, and no, of course he wouldn’t. But there’s really no hurry, Christina. It’s little more than an acknowledgement and—’

  Christina was already on her feet. She looked in Jack’s direction, trying to catch his eye, but he was leaning over the bar, ordering another round of drinks.

  Mavis, having suitably warmed up with ‘Chatanooga Choo-Choo’, spectacularly ignored Daniel’s request for an old favourite and launched into another newly popular song. Only later, as she hurried up Magnolia Hill towards the Square, did Christina realize that its title, ‘My Guy’s Come Back’, was, with Jack standing only feet away from her, brazenly provocative.